Returning wood to the cooking fire

When Matthew Semmelhack and Mark Liberman, the owners of AQ in San Francisco, open their new restaurant nearby later this year, they won’t have a stove. Or an oven.

Instead, the kitchen at TBD, as it will be known, will be dominated by an 8-foot-wide stainless steel wood-fired grill, outfitted with custom-built nooks, fire cages for coal production and four independent cooking surfaces that Liberman, the chef, can easily raise and lower with hand-cranked wheels.

Nearly everything he turns out — smoked fluke crudo, say, or maybe spit-roasted Cornish hens and charred endive glazed with orange and burned sugar — will be cooked on this sole piece of equipment, eliminating the relative predictability of appliances that ignite with the turn of dial and provide consistent heat.

Forget the barbecue pits and tiled pizza ovens popping up like sparks in a tinderbox — wood-fired grills are poised to become the new face of flame. A growing number of chefs are using them to elevate wood cookery to new heights, making food that is light-years from barbecue.

Some, like Seamus Mullen of Tertulia, in New York even say they have come to see the grills as integral to their cooking. The smoke of the grill there, he said, is “the signature, distinctive flavor of the restaurant.” About 90 percent of the dishes on his menu include elements cooked on Tertulia’s green-tiled grill, which is also used as an oven, a broiler, a smoker and a flat-top griddle.

True converts, like Liberman, shun more-conventional stoves and ovens altogether, making the grills the centerpieces of their kitchens. At Mas (la grillade) in New York, the chef Galen Zamarra does all his elegant, ingredient-driven cooking on one of four wood-fired grills in the basement; he makes his own charcoal and even has a dedicated woodshed, retrofitted from a former newsstand, that he rents next door.

Unlike a traditional grill, which has a grate set directly over a fire, these versions are designed to give chefs far more flexibility and more control over what’s happening to their food. The multiple cooking surfaces can be raised and lowered manually, and can be fitted with racks and rotisseries.

Some grills are enclosed on the three sides, lined with brick or tiled walls that retain heat. In addition to more straightforward grilling, you could roast and bake using the wall’s ambient heat, sear over the bottom fire, or cold smoke high above.

The cost of installing one is comparable to putting in conventional equipment; Semmelhack said that going with a grill saved them the cost of running a gas line into the TBD kitchen, an expensive proposition.

Ben Eisendrath, the owner of Grillworks, a manufacturer of high-end, hand-built stainless steel grills that have become a cult favorite among chefs, said that the fastest-growing segment of his business, which also includes grills for home use, is creating these custom-designed, indoor grills for chefs. (Eisendrath, who lives in Washington, said he has so much potential business in New York restaurants alone that he’s searching for a pied-À-terre here.)

His clients have included Semmelhack and Liberman of TBD, Mullen of Tertulia, Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Sean Brock, who has installed a 4-1/2-foot-wide model at Husk Nashville, which opened this month.

Brock said the grill was the first piece of equipment he wanted to get for Husk Nashville, an offshoot of one of his restaurants in Charleston, S.C. “We always embraced cooking with wood and smoke in the South,” he said. “But the more I cook that way, the more I realize how much more soul it adds to the food.”

Indeed, the chefs who have taken to doing so much of their cooking on the grill aren’t discovering something new so much as exploring the ancient. Wood-fired cooking, after all, is the oldest kind there is, and Spaniards and South Americans have been using similar, albeit more rustic, grills for centuries. (The Grillworks design was inspired by Argentine parrilladas, and shares the V-shaped rack that prevents fat from dripping directly into flames, preventing acrid, sooty flare-ups.)

Chefs are able to make wood cookery feel fresh by incorporating smoke into their food with a subtle hand. They are also constantly exploring new uses for the grill. The Spanish chef Victor Arguinzoniz has been hugely influential in this respect, drawing visitors from all over the world to his restaurant in the Basque region of Spain, Asador Etxebarri, where everything (caviar, smoked goat-milk ice cream) is either cooked directly on a big-wheeled grill or touched by smoke or flame.